If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive. ~ Samuel Goldwyn

I Got Nuthin ~ So read this by Bernard Goldberg from his book, "BIAS"

It's long and I'm having to fix some of the format, but I'll post what I have for now... even this much is worth the read.Great day everyone!

Targeting Men

Putz. It's one of those funny-sounding, completely inelegant Yiddish words that is totally without charm but manages to make its point. Like schmuck. For the uninitiated, putz, loosely translated, means jerk -as in "I went to this fabulously trendy East Side restaurant and ordered the pesto pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and the waiter brought me spaghetti and meatballs. What a putz!" For some reason this word is used a lot in Manhattan but almost never in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. As for the literal translation of putz -don't ask. (Hint: rhymes with Venus.)The "wounding power of slurs" is something the New York Times and sensitive network news types are always on the lookout for. Except when the slur is aimed at the one group they consider fair game. Men. This brings us to Harry Smith, the former coanchor of CBS This Morning, as affable a feminist as you'll ever meet -and even in a business populated by so many liberals, Harry is out there, way off in left field. It was the summer of 1995...There was Harry interviewing the actor Dennis Quaid about a movie he had just done, Something to Talk About. In the movie Quaid plays a sleazeball, a married man who can't keep his hands off half the women in town. To Harry this is how men act in real life too. Which prompted him to say to Quaid, "I'm under the assumption that most men are putzes." In Harry's mind this was a perfectly reasonable observation. Because to Harry Smith, most men are putzes. I know this because I called him a few days later and asked just what he had in mind. "Men are the cheaters," Harry told me. "Men are the philanderers. We're the ones who don't take care of our families." The word putz was creeping into my mind... but it wasn't most men I was thinking about. "And white guys are running around the country complaining that they're victims," he added, just to make sure I was getting his point. I understand all that hut what I can't figure out is how you can spell "Harry Smith" without using the letters pc. But what if affable Harry Smith (who in 1999 left CBS News to host A&E's Biography) in some other context had said, "I'm under the assumption that most black people are putzes”? Or "most Irish are putzes"? Or "most Jews are putzes"?

Let's put it this way: if he had said any of those things, good ol' Harry would have been out on his affable liberal ass in about the time it would have taken his bosses to say, "Pack your stuff and get out, you putz!" Even then, Harry would have been lucky to get a job doing the overnight news at a radio station in Kodiak, Alaska, which is one of those places where they don't use the word putz all that much. "What if you said on the air," I asked Harry, "you know, I think most women are putzes. Do you think management would have tolerated that?" He couldn't stop laughing. What Harry meant is, "You've got to be kidding, putzhead -they would have tossed me out the freakin' window" Nobody at CBS News thought this putz episode was any big deal. Eric Ober, the president of the news division, said it was a joke. No harm, no foul. I'm sure he was right. And I'm sure he would have felt the same way if I had gone on television and said, "You know, Ms. Steinem, I don't understand what you and all your feminist friends are always com-plaining about. You women are such putzes" And it was a joke, too, when Katie Couric, on NBC, asked a bride who had been jilted at the altar about a proper remedy: "Have you considered castration as an option?" Warren Farrell, a California psychologist and former board member of the New York chapter of NOW, was exercising at his home near San Diego, watching the Today show, the morning Katie made her castration joke. In his book, Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say, he wondered what would happen if Katie's cohost, Matt Lauer, asked a jilted groom, "Have you considered the option of cutting off her breasts?" Well, Farrell didn't really wonder what would happen. Like everybody else, he knew. "NBC would be considering the option of cutting off his contract." The difference between the two is obvious, isn't it? Castration is funny. Cutting off breasts is not funny.

4 comments:

When you make of a majority group in power, (white men)it is considered satire. When you make fun aof a minority, it is considered harrassment. Calling a woman a putz is so out of context to be laughable. There are other deragatory terms for females.

As for cutting off a woman's breasts, that is offensive to most everyone because all children suckle at their mother's nipples.

But, back to the 'liberal' media. I am going to make the assumption that the media is 'liberal' becuase in order to maintain its independance and 1st-amendment stature, it must be liberal and allow comments and expressions that are within the tolerance of a culture. To criticize the status-quo is a liberal ideal.